People who grew up watching their parents stay together unhappily often become adults who are simultaneously terrified of commitment and terrified of leaving. They inherited the architecture of endurance without ever being shown what it was supposed to protect - Silicon Canals

"Children are astonishingly good at reading rooms. Long before they can name what's happening, they can feel when a household runs on tension disguised as stability. The absence of shouting doesn't mean the absence of conflict. In many unhappy marriages, the conflict is the quiet itself: the way conversations stay shallow, the way touch becomes transactional, the way every interaction carries the weight of something unsaid."

"Most people assume the children of divorce carry the heaviest relational damage. Entire shelves of self-help books are built around that assumption. But the research tells a more complicated story. Growing up inside a home where two people remained together out of obligation, guilt, or inertia can produce a specific kind of relational paralysis in the adult child: a person who can't commit and can't leave, who learned endurance as the highest relational virtue but was never shown what endurance was supposed to protect."

Children who grow up in unhappy marriages often experience a unique form of relational paralysis as adults. They witness their parents' commitment to a miserable relationship, leading them to feel that commitment is a death sentence while leaving feels like a moral failure. This creates a conflict where they cannot fully engage in relationships. The silence and tension in their homes teach them endurance as a virtue, but they lack the understanding of what that endurance is meant to protect, resulting in a struggle to move forward in their own relationships.

Read at Silicon Canals